Committee on Standards in Public Life

Seven years of the Committee on Standards in Public Life – where now?

Notes for remarks to the annual lecture of the Association of University Administrators, University of Manchester, 8 November 2001

High standards in public life are crucial to the functioning of our democracy

I am grateful for the opportunity to talk to you today, setting out some of the issues that are in my mind in the early months of my chairmanship of the Committee of Standards on Public Life

Let me begin by explaining why I believe the subject before us today is central to the health of liberal democracy in Britain today.

The Committee’s work is based on a few simple precepts:

• Public officials and public institutions must command the trust of the public which they serve
• The people’s perceptions of the maintenance of high standards of conduct are almost as important as the reality
• If this confidence is eroded, the basic foundations of our political society will be weakened.

The origins of the Committee on Standards in Public Life

Beliefs like this led to the establishment of the Committee on Standards in Public Life by John Major in 1994. I am not going to rehearse the detailed history of that time.

The context was, of course, the numerous allegations of sleaze current at the time, the cash for questions controversy, allegations that public appointments were made in party interest and so on.

Suffice it to say that people’s perception of behaviour in public life at the time had lead to a great deal of concern and cynicism about politics.

Since 1994, the Committee has steadily examined British public life, institution by institution. It has made recommendations covering a wide range of organisations and people – from Parliament, Ministers and the Civil Service through to Local Government, Non-Departmental Public Bodies, NHS Trusts and local public spending bodies – to ensure the highest standards of propriety.

The stock take

The Committee has just published a stock take of all 308 recommendations and 26 observations which it has made over those seven years in its seven reports.

Alongside each, we have recorded the response those recommendations received at the time they were made. To this we have added details of the action to date. There may be some in this audience who have helped us complete the stock take, and I am grateful for that.

The document makes no assessment of the material at this stage. But we intend to use it to review implementation, delivery and outcomes for the issues that fall within the Committee’s Terms of Reference.

We have some work ahead of us to make the most effective use of the material it contains. But you can see at a glance that most of the Committee’s recommendations have, over the years been implemented. As a result of the Committee’s work, virtually every aspect of our public life has new arrangements safeguarding standards of conduct.

If you look at my Committee’s terms of reference, you will see that they are written in practical pragmatic terms.

Sometimes the Committee on Standards in Public Life is termed ‘an ethics committee’. It is not a terminology I much like.

Certainly, our terms of reference are not written in such high flown terms. It does not call upon the Committee to recommend codes of ethics.

Instead, the Committee is enjoined to:

‘...make recommendations as to any changes in present arrangements...to ensure the highest standards of propriety in public life’.

16. The presumption is that there are ethical standards. And the need is for practical arrangements to make sure that they are reflected, and seen to be reflected, in public life. I will describe in a moment a little about how the Committee in its next stage of work intends to identify more precisely what those ethical standards are.

My belief is that in a well functioning society, ethics are absolute in the sense that you cannot differentiate ethical standards between political life, business life or the university life for that matter.

Any community that seeks such differentiation will get itself into a muddle. The same basic ethical standards have to rule whatever the particular field of activity.

The seven principles of public life

True to its practical and pragmatic vocation, the Committee fashioned for itself, right from the beginning, a sort of template in the form of the Seven Principles of Public Life.

The Seven Principles of Public Life have come to be a beacon that illuminates virtually every document produced by public institutions on standards of propriety in public life.

Every one active in public life now and in the future is in the debt of Lord Nolan’s original Committee for these seven principles – a sort of seven commandments for public officials.

Standards in the higher education sector

Your own Association’s experience and that of the higher education sector generally provide a valuable case study on how the process for enhancing standards has and should work.

Way back in 1996 the second report of the Committee looked at a range of public bodies and included a number of recommendations for Higher Education sector.

Its conclusion was generally comforting.

As always, critical comment in a few cases had tarnished the reputation of the great majority, but the general consensus was that ‘... standards of conduct in higher education... were generally very good.’

Even so, the Committee made a number of recommendations and it is good to see that many of these have been implemented.

The Committee recommended that the framework of the Seven Principles should be adopted in the higher education sector. In response, the Committee of University Chairmen has fully incorporated them into their Guide for Members of Governing Bodies of Universities and Colleges in England Wales and Northern Ireland.

Your own Association has adopted a slightly different but equally valid approach in constructing your own, freestanding Code of Professional Standards. This takes the underpinning philosophy of the Seven Principles and tailors it specifically to your ownworking environment.

Your experience is a good illustration of how my Committee’s work can be applied in practice. We do not provide a rulebook. We recognise that there are different ways of achieving the desired end result, namely the adherence of the highest standards of propriety in public life.

But we do expect each institution to build ethical standards into its corporate culture. Although our terms of reference only refer to ‘public office holders’, the principles will not have an impact unless everyone from board level down understands the framework of behaviours that is expected of them.

That is why I especially welcome the integration of the Code into the Association’s programme of Continuous Professional Development. I hope that this will prove an effective instrument for ensuring that individual members become familiar with the Code. It should be used as a working tool to reinforce cultural change and then adherence to the principles will become second nature in time. I will follow this initiative with interest.

Let me single out two further initiatives in the higher education sector, which are of interest to my Committee.

One is the CUC’s implementation of some particular arrangements in specific areas that are familiar to my Committee, namely:

• Appointment on merit
• Common standards of openness in corporate governance
• Public registers of interest for members of governing bodies
• Clearly defined terms of appointment with one option to serve a second term

The second initiative that I especially welcome is the CUC’s acknowledgement of the role of ‘whistleblowing’, although I am aware that there are still some outstanding concerns about the position of more junior staff. Cases regularly demonstrate the truth of the statement in the Guidance that ‘Members of staff are often the first to know when things are going wrong in an institution.’

Inevitably, there are some other areas where the stock take shows that more work needs to be done. I shall watch the progress of the Universities UK consultation on the establishment of an ombudsman as an external arbiter of complaints and appeals.

It is always important to establish effective ways to enforce good standards and for the thorough investigation of alleged breaches. Independent scrutiny of complaints always plays a crucial role in assuring public confidence.

Proportionality

Perhaps you might allow me at this stage of my remarks to ride one of my hobbyhorses.

It relates to that word ‘proportionality’, which was considered in our second report, which said:

‘Regulators and funders should:

• seek to reduce detailed monitoring and collection of information:
• to make fewer changes in their requirements and give adequate notice of such changes: and
• to place more reliance on audit reports‘

There is a tendency, innate in any bureaucracy, to elaborate, indeed sometimes over elaborate, even the most well meaning rules. The bureaucratic mill can grind very fine indeed. The result is a rule based approach to standards issues, based on voluminous documentation. Sometimes too the processes can become excessively legalistic, with submissions, counter submissions and so on.

Of course, in this age that rightly puts great store on the protection of human rights, it is right that individuals have an opportunity to explain if they are accused of conduct that falls below the highest standards of propriety. The system must observe the principles of natural justice.

But the system will lose credibility if it loses the essential element of proportionality and becomes over bureaucratic and rule based.

The key in my view is to have a truly independent element of scrutiny together with a body for each institution of unimpeachable authority, undoubted credibility and sound judgement that makes the final decisions.

The importance of institutions

Let me make another observation fundamental to the work of my Committee, and again it stems from our terms of reference.

They are directed at the holders of public office, and not so much at the public institutions in which they work. We each have a personal responsibility for upholding the Seven Principles of Public Life.

But if you examine the Committee’s seven reports and 308 recommendations, they are almost all directed at institutions. That, I believe, underlines a factor of crucial importance.

A key to the maintenance of the highest standards of propriety in public life is proper safeguards – or ‘arrangements’ to use the word in our terms of reference – in individual institutions, supported by the right institutional culture.

So we need strong institutions.

But institutions which are responsive to the public concerns about standards of conduct.

That requires, above all, Leadership from those at the top of the institution – the leaders of public institutions must be seen to set the highest standards by personal example.

Theirs is a personal responsibility for ensuring that that the arrangements are in place for monitoring and maintaining standards throughout the institution.

Whose standards? The Committee’s survey of public attitudes

I have referred more than once in my remarks to public concerns about standards of conduct of holders of public office.

This immediately prompts the question, ‘How do you know what those concerns are?’ And this brings me to an important new area of work that the Committee has just launched.

Hitherto, the Committee has sought to define the nature of the public concerns about standards of conduct on the basis of evidence taken during the preparation of its seven reports.

In fact, we know very little about the public’s attitude to these questions. So far as I am aware, little systematic attitudinal research into standards of conduct has ever been conducted in Britain. So the evidential base for our work is somewhat sketchy, and we need to remedy this.

If public expectations and the actual standards which public office holders strive to uphold do not coincide there will be confusion ahead. This is how the cynicism that can be so corrosive of the political process arises.

This is an important piece of work for the Committee. But it is difficult and complex. We are determined that the research should be of first class quality and authority, and it will form an important addition to our evidential base.

So how are we going about the work?

How we propose to carry out the research

Our first aim is to discover what the public sees as the key issues in this area. Our second aim is to explore what their attitude is to particular types of conduct.

To make the research as relevant as possible, we may want to design the research around some ‘vignettes’. By this I mean giving some concrete examples of the types of issues and behaviours that members of the public would recognise and respond to.

This will be quite a long project and so we will divide it into three stages. Stage 1 will be exploratory and qualitative, designed to clarify what the key issues are. Stage 2 will use the material gathered in Stage 1 to develop and test the questions. Stage 3 will deploy those questions in a quantitative survey to measure the proportion of people with different attitudes. We will require a written report at the end of stage 1, which we would expect to publish some time in 2002.

We launched the research specification in September and we are now reaching the end of the tendering process. We approached 12 organisations, selected for their expertise in this type of work, and five submitted proposals. We have also appointed an expert Advisory Board to ensure that the project achieves its goals.

We intend to repeat the research at suitable intervals to see whether public opinion is changing.

This is not because we want to compare the performance of one government against another.

I suspect the research will show that the public are more concerned about the broader and subtler concerns than playing one party off against another. The important thing is that we shall have a way of discovering the nature of the people’s concerns about standards in public life.

Public and Private

Let me in conclusion refer to a particular issue which our stock take of the Committee’s work to date has thrown into relief.

That issue is the growing partnership between the public sector and business – and by business, I mean here profit-making commercial organisations – and what all this means for the maintenance of high standards of propriety in the public sector.

The Committee’s second report contained the following observation:

‘Where a citizen receives a service which is paid for wholly or in part by the taxpayer, then the Government or local authority must retain appropriate responsibility for safeguarding the interests of both user and taxpayer regardless of the status of the service provider.’

This is a topic of especial interest to the HE sector, I know, and raises a number of particularly difficult and sensitive considerations particularly in the field of research. The key points were highlighted in Stephen Chandler’s paper ‘Profitable Ideas? Making research pay’ , given at your Exeter conference earlier this year.

Let me make three points before I go any further:

The views I will express today are my own, and not those of my Committee. The Committee may consider some of these issues formally in due course, but today I want to test out with you whether there are questions that need to be explored further.

Second, I am not concerned whether the policy to encourage such public or private partnership is right or wrong – that is not a decision for the Committee or me. My interest is to follow my Committee’s terms of reference to ‘... make recommendations as to any changes in present arrangements which might be required to ensure the highest standards of propriety in public life.’

Third, I am not in any way implying that private sector ethics are either worse or better than public sector ethics – as I argued earlier, I believe the fundamentals are the same. But those same ethics operate in different contexts and the safeguards for ensuring the maintenance will be different. In short, there is a risk of confusion if the arrangements for ensuring high standards of propriety are not clear.

There are many types of links between the public sector and business which do not go as far as true privatisation, for example:

• PFI and PPP
• Contracting out services to the private sector
• Secondment of business people to work in government
• Sponsorship of government activities by business

There may be some people who say that all that matters is results, say in the form of better delivery of services.

But there is more to it than that. The service involved is being paid for by taxpayers money and sometimes under the authority of a statutory obligation.

If the self-same service were being delivered by a public agency, the Seven Principles would apply. But how are they to be applied if a private sector supplier provides the publicly financed service?

And this was the issue behind the observation in the Committee’s second report to which I referred earlier .

I emphasise that in raising these issues, I do not do so to seek to frustrate co-operation and partnership between the public and private sectors. But I wonder whether there is a need for more clarity. Because if there is a lack of clarity about the precise arrangements which rule, there will be a risk of confusion and muddle

I have deliberately ranged widely in my remarks in the hope of stimulating some debate here this evening. So I conclude with the statement with which I began. Public officials and public institutions must command the trust of the public that they serve. And it is to serving that objective to which the Committee on Standards in Public Life is dedicated.

Thank you.